Do you have something you are avoiding right now? Something you promised to do, or some emotion you’d rather not feel? If you say no, I’m pretty sure you are lying (if only to yourself). Every one of us is out of integrity in some way. The state of being human is also the state of imperfection. Our willingness to look at and own these imperfections is what keeps them from unconsciously owning us and is a key piece of the elegant system for living that we call yoga. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the word integrity has two definitions: “the quality of being honest and fair” and “the state of being complete or whole”. Unfortunately, it seems we have interpreted the first definition too loosely and disregarded the second. Honesty and fairness have gotten mixed up with morality and virtue and in doing so, we’ve lost track of why they are important. Integrity is not about right and wrong, it’s about what is functional. Offering to help others even when we know we will drain or deprive ourselves is not functional. Neither are breaking promises, chronic lateness, or shoddy work. Making time for self care is functional. Burning the candle indefinitely at both ends definitely is not. The more that we live our lives with integrity, the worthier we will feel. Not the sort of worthiness that implies a hierarchy (as in, worthier than thou) but the worthiness that we all share as living beings. An internal sense of this kind of worthiness helps us to enjoy the preciousness of our own lives and see other lives...

Since most of us spend a lot of our days sitting, ‘hip openers’ have become a popular focus of yoga classes, videos, and workshops. However, our sedentary hips become weak as well as tight and a thoughtful, balanced approach is necessary to keep this large and stable joint healthy and functional. Read on for my advice on how to get the most out of your hip openers. #1 Listen to your low back Your hips are the joint that connects your legs to your pelvis. Many of the muscles that move your hips affect the tilt of your pelvis. If those muscles become imbalanced, they often pull your low back into an overly rounded position, an overly arched position, or sometimes both at once! Therefore, the health & wellbeing of your low back is directly connected to the health and wellbeing of your hips. When you practice hip opening poses, pay special attention to the sensations and mobility of your low back. If you find yourself in a position where you cannot move your low back forward into its natural lordotic curve, you are likely placing your back under unnecessary stress. This is different from consciously choosing to round your low back during a hip opener, which may be a very helpful and enjoyable position. #2 Make time for downtime Even though most of us live safer lives than our ancestors, we spend more time with our SNS (sympathetic nervous system) activated. The SNS is the part of our nervous system that ensures our survival (the fight or flight response). It causes us to be alert, watchful, and ready...

Some people walk into their first yoga class, press the soles of their feet together and boom – their knees fall right to the ground for a perfect bound angle pose. Other people practice for decades and still need to sit on something to get their knees to level with their hip bones – the measure for this pose to be safe for your spine. Often, the latter group will ask their teacher “will my hips ever open?”. The answer is, most likely, no. That doesn’t mean you should stop stretching them – but it might change how and why you stretch them. If your hip mobility is limited when you first begin yoga, there is hope of improvement. However, if you’ve been working on it for years or even decades, the problem is most likely the structure of the joint itself. Just as human beings come in a variety of shapes and sizes, so do their bones. The largely ignored consequence of this diversity is that human movement varies greatly from person to person. Your ability to perform many traditional yoga poses is determined more by the shape of your bones than the stretch of your muscles. While there is infinite variety in the human form, there are two main structural differences in the hip joint that inform your ability to perform yoga poses. The first is the size of your femur head & the depth of your acetabulum (hip socket). People with a deeper hip socket tend to have less mobility in their hips because the bones with encounter limitations more quickly. In the photograph below you...

People have been asking me for my response to William Broad’s latest NY Times article on yoga, so here you go: While the article is a bit sensationalistic, it does bring up a very important topic that is the elephant in the room in conversations about the benefits of yoga: the problem of hypermobile people making flexibility the main focus of their exercise regime. Muscles need to be both strong and flexible in order to be healthy. Yoga isn’t inherently just about flexibility, but it does have a flexibility bias. Of course it’s problematic to talk about ‘yoga’ as if it were a defined entity – it definitely is not. However, since yoga classes have become ubiquitous in the US, it’s important to me to observe the trends (both positive and negative) and see how I can be a part of the solution. The unfortunate truth is that naturally supple people tend to train flexibility and naturally stable people tend to train strength. This is a mistake in either direction. It’s a classic story. A naturally flexible person attends their first yoga class & the poses come easily. This makes them feel sucessful, and they often get positive reinforcement from the teacher or other students. The combination of internal and external reinforcement entices the student to practice regularly and a love of yoga is born. I was one of these people. Never very athletic, I pretty much hated exercise until I found yoga. Finally, an exercise modality that I was good at! Within a few years of practice, I loved it so much that I took a teacher training....

Even if I can’t do a full yoga practice, I try to get upside down every single day for at least a few minutes. An inversion practice can be as simple as a standing forward bend or legs up the wall or as complex as a scorpion handstand. Whatever your strength, energy level, and balance allow, put your heart above your head and reap the many benefits of inverting: Reverse the aging force of gravity Stimulate circulation & lower blood pressure Lower pressure on your spine to reduce neck and back pain Improve posture Strengthen Core Boot brain power & improve mental awareness Calm the mind & relieve stress Enhance relaxation and promote sounder sleep Improve digestion and elimination Elevate mood and combat depression If you’re ready to take your inversion practice to the next level, join me on Saturday June 29th for Inversions Demystified at The Asheville Yoga Center. Inversions Demystified is 2.5 hours of focused attention on the skills it takes to improve your inversions. Come as you are, I specialize in helping beginners and those with fear of inverting as well as more advanced practitioners find their next edge in their inversion...

Do you have a part of you that just creeps you out? An aspect to your personality that you’d rather nobody knew about – even yourself? Do you have a persistent dysfunctional pattern that you keep thinking you’re over – until it pops up again? Of course you do. We all do. And it’s often referred to as our “shadow”. Just like everyone’s body makes a dark reflection on a sunny day, all of us have a dark element to our selves. For most of us this is not news, but the idea that you should actually explore this element of your self might be. And it’s no surprise that our shadows tend to come out around the people we love & trust the most. The people we least want to hurt. The ones whose shadows are spilling out over us in return. In service to them and to ourselves, the icky sticky work of befriending our shadow is a worth endeavor. I’ve learned to recognize my own shadow by my desire to run away, hide my head, and look at anything else but that. In fact, I feel a resistance to even writing this post. But the problem with running away & pretending it doesn’t exist is that it doesn’t do any good. No matter how much we run, hide, or pretend, our shadow will catch up with us. In fact, it is unlikely to ever go away completely. So like it or not, our shadow side is a constant companion. Sometimes silent & unobtrusive, other times impossible to ignore, our shadow has the most hold over us...